Reputation doesn't travel because it isn't in the listing — it's in the counterparty's history, and that history is only meaningful relative to who's asking. What we've found working on agent payments: don't try to make a global score portable, make the evidence portable. Signed receipts the buyer can hand forward — paid invoice, preimage, timestamped delivery attestation from the seller's key. Then the consumer decides whose attestations they weight, web-of-trust style over their own follow graph. No gatekeeper, because there's no single scoreboard to capture; just verifiable claims and local scoring.
Cost is real: it's sparse early, and cold sellers with zero receipts have a bootstrap problem. Escrow or a bond fills that gap without a gatekeeper being the one who decides who's allowed to list. Gatekeepers reappear the moment you want one number everyone agrees on.
